Rational Action

Bury Me With It
Well, I am listening to Modest Mouse, as the most intelligent of you might be able to tell by the title of this post. I’m in one of those moods where little thoughts set me off into odd sad states. A mood that this song, Bury Me With It, captures pretty well in its tone.

I like how Modest Mouse has such a passionate sound to their music. Another band I want to listen to, and as usual I’ve waited until they have become popular. But there are more important topics at hand; god forbid this post turns into standard blogshit!

Bukowski
I watched the Clinton interview tonight with my parents. The man knows how to lie passionately. I want to trust him so much when I hear him speak; he believes strongly about so many topics and what he says must contain a great deal of truth. Yet he posseses the capability to lie at whim to his wife, his family, and the American people.

Why am I rambling about this? Because I want to talk about myself:

The View
In the interview, they showed Clinton a tape in which his mother spoke about how great of a son her child had become. Clinton got choked up and looked sincerely at the interviewer, saying, “I had never seen that tape before. Thank you for showing me that.” I said to my father, “He’s such a good liar. I wonder if he’s seen that that tape before.” My father responded that I was being even more skeptical than he was.

Satin in a Coffin (what a song!)
For my father to think of me as skeptical means a lot to me. He’s a skeptical person and I tend to think that I inherited my skepticism from him. I suppose I pulled it in with amplification, though.

Blame it on the Tetons
I’m not sure what that trait signifies for me as a person. If I end up doing political science or economics, it could come in handy.

Which brings me to my next point: I desperately want to write up a few paragraphs taking a position on some issue and showing some logic behind arriving at that position (normative). I would also like to write up a few paragraphs analyzing some issue without taking any position on it (positive). Would anyone be interested in having some kind of online debate? Or just listening to me talk?

Oh fuck it. I’ll just write about Bush’s foreign policy or something. But given my and my (presumed) readers’ position on that issue I doubt anyone would object my claims. I could argue in favor of Bush’s economic policy, but that’d be a stretch for me. Maybe I will just make a big post full of conjecture that manages to piss off everyone.

Black Cadillacs
Watching the Clinton interview, I got wistful for his policies — as if I were really conscious of them while he was in office. But one thing in particular really got me:

He was talking about the handshake between Yassir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. You could tell that he interacted on a personal level with them. As he related some funny conversation he had with the men before their handshake, the program showed a picture of the two leaders in the embrace. I got a little upset, almost teary even, when I saw the picture. Just the idea expressed in that picture seems like such a far away dream right now. It makes me so sad.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 21st, 2004 at 12:24 am and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.